Gustavo Jardim > Marco Polo’s dream // O sonho de Marco Polo

At the gates of a labyrinth, the head is still spinning in South America time zone. The truth is that probably I haven’t arrived yet. I am surrounded by Europeans and we are waiting for the employee who calls our hosts to check the good intentions of our visit. Mine is Keiwan, member of Kooshk Art Residency. I wait for two hours, adjusting my pointers with the physical, sentimental and temporal distance. I write on my watch that today is the 13th of Bahman’s month, 1394. I think I can forget the time zone now and think about the historical time.

I felt the same goose bumps at Rio Tapajós, when I entered the Amazon labyrinth in 2007. It was Jó, son of the maguari chief, who guided us in a night hunting after a sumaúma tree. Guides and hosts change a lot the place where one arrives as a foreigner. Jó was walking ahead calmly, touching things with his ears, decoding smells, rubbing the skin on the body of the forest and holding hands with the leaves of the trees. I thought that was very similar of making art, imagining the inside of the forest, feeling the presence of what we don’t see, being guided by instincts many times similar of the animal’s that inhabit it.

After having my visa approved, I leave a French fellow at the waiting room, already pissed off with the system, talking about the precariousness of the service, the incompetence of the employee, about last year’s adventures; I think he’ll stay there much longer. The conversation reminds me of a case poet Ucho Ribeiro, from Montes Claros, told me. Once, he got scared with an anaconda very close, in the forest. His mouth got dry and he looked to the indigenous guy who was with him. The guy told him to be quiet and whispered: “Don’t say anything, because she doesn’t know yet she’s a snake”.

Back to 2015, I had the opportunity of an experience with people from maxakali, pataxó, krenak, pankaruru, guarani and xakriabá tribes. I noticed the linguistic and artistic richness that circulates closed in the indigenous nations, resisting for more than 500 years of war against Brazil. I feel that from the point of view of communication, I about to face something similar in Iran, a people invaded by external interests on their natural heritage and living internal insecurity (considered the proportions) that threatens their symbolic and spiritual patrimony. They became images built by explorers, which populate the world in a movement that separate them from our lives, like an apparition only intended to subtract.

I made an image for a research I called “Marco Polo’s Dream”. I was thinking about making a work about oil because I wrote recently an article on this subject, regarding invasions. I think about what is called the attention of a foreigner when he steps in unknown lands, imagining Marco Polo when he arrived to Persia. Later I’d see pools with clean water and a compelling infrastructure of channels used by Persians to collect water from the rain, the thaw and the water table. This oil project came back to my mind. That sounded to me a forgotten part of a exploration dream.

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About Gustavo Jardim

Filmmaker and video artist, working in the fields of cinema, literature and new media. Director of the collaborative production center DuRolo, which receives artists and art collectives, developing projects with many diferent approaches. Master degree in Film Language and Education on going for the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Works with art education with indigenous tribes and communities with rates of social risk.